Sean Nero

Sam­sung has com­mit­ted to mod­ernising T&T's ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem through its Smart Class­room ini­tia­tive, the tech­nol­o­gy gi­ant's re­gion­al mar­ket­ing man­ag­er, Jen­nifer Don­ley an­nounced on Thurs­day evening.

"We are ac­tu­al­ly work­ing on fo­cus­ing and en­hanc­ing and en­sur­ing that those Smart Schools are suc­cess­ful in 2016 and hope­ful­ly be able to ex­pand lat­er in the year and of course in 2017," she said as Sam­sung un­veiled its lat­est mo­bile hand­sets and as­so­ci­at­ed gear be­fore the lo­cal me­dia at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre.

"T&T is one of our pri­ma­ry mar­kets in the Caribbean. We launched in oth­er mar­kets, as well, but we al­ways launch in T&T. Peo­ple in T&T are al­ways look­ing for the next best thing. We have be­come Sam­sung grown here and we have a lot of fol­low­ers and we have done very well, so it's def­i­nite­ly a core mar­ket for us.

"We will con­tin­ue to have our launch events here. We will con­tin­ue to sup­port it. It's very wel­com­ing to the Sam­sung brand and we will con­tin­ue to sup­port the mar­ket as long as the mar­ket sup­ports us and that's where we are at right now."

The Smart Class­room ini­tia­tive us­es tablets and ed­u­ca­tion­al tools to con­nect teach­ers and stu­dents. The dig­i­tal class­room al­lows teach­ers to keep track of stu­dents' progress in re­al time, which en­ables them to ad­just their teach­ing in­stan­ta­neous­ly if they see that stu­dents are hav­ing trou­ble with a spe­cif­ic top­ic.

Com­ment­ing on the com­pa­ny's oth­er projects in the coun­try, Don­ley said the Sam­sung Ex­pe­ri­ence stores at Gulf City Mall, West­mall and Trinci­ty Mall are very ap­peal­ing to the pub­lic.

She said the com­pa­ny takes pride in lis­ten­ing to its cus­tomers and many of the new fea­tures avail­able in the next gen­er­a­tion hand­sets were de­vel­oped and in­clud­ed based on con­sumer re­quest. In a de­lib­er­ate ef­fort to trans­form the lives of its cus­tomers, she added, Sam­sung in­tro­duced hand­sets with sleek­er de­signs, ad­vanced cam­era func­tion­al­i­ty, as well as stream­lin­ing of soft­ware aimed at push­ing the lim­its of what tra­di­tion­al smart­phones are ca­pa­ble of.

The com­pa­ny al­so ad­dressed is­sues re­lat­ed to stor­age by adding an ex­tra mi­cro SD card slot, while in­creas­ing bat­tery ca­pac­i­ty and wire­less charg­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

Don­ley said gamers would be de­light­ed to know that the Galaxy 7 and S7 in­clude fea­tures such as Game Launch­er and Vulkan API.

"We were lis­ten­ing to them and those were the things we in­cor­po­rat­ed back in­to the de­vices, so I think it's a mix of new re­search and de­vel­op­ment, al­ways stay­ing in­no­v­a­tive as we have been with these de­vices and it's al­so about lis­ten­ing to our cus­tomers. I think with those two things to­geth­er, we will con­tin­ue to stay rel­e­vant in the mar­ket," she said.

Don­ley said Sam­sung's de­ci­sion to es­tab­lish a lo­cal of­fice un­der­scored its com­mit­ment to the T&T mar­ket. See Page A16